It's easy to underestimate the importance of the review process. When considering a purchase, we scour Amazon for well-written reviews, YouTube for thorough comparisons, and (obviously) Android Police for insightful hands-on articles. We do it for everything from smartphones to cars to vacuum cleaners. Sometimes we even enjoy reading reviews for things we don't want to buy, simply for our own amusement. So why do we generally ignore app reviews on Google Play?

If I had to guess — and it isn't really much of a guess at all — I'd point my finger at the overwhelmingly poor quality of app reviews in general. The same is almost universally true for all app stores, but for Android in particular, users are petty, juvenile, or just plain vindictive, and, on average, reviews hardly give any sense of the quality of an app. Unless it makes up by being entertaining, bad reviews are simply a waste of everyone's time.

Obviously, there are ways to counteract this, with the most obvious one being to float high-quality reviews to the top and bury poor ones at the bottom. Google has already been employing this for a few years now with some success, when it began sorting reviews by helpfulness instead of in reverse chronological order. How Google actually classifies the "helpfulness" of a review is somewhat of an unknown, and the algorithm could probably do with a few improvements.

There are still countless measures that could be taken to improve the overall review experience (filtering by version number or increasing the character limit of reviews come to mind), and that's why virtually any news of Google experimenting with reviews is good news.

We've received a tip from one of our regular readers that Google is running a limited test with review highlights on the Play Store. Review highlights provide a quick glance at what a majority of users are saying about a given app, thus giving potential installers a brief summary of what they can expect to see.

At this point, it's too soon to know for certain if this will eventually roll out to every user, but if the data collected by Google is favorable (and I'm somewhat inclined to believe it will be), we may hope to see this in a future Play Store update. Or maybe not. Who knows?

The review highlights feature appears to have been finalized and is now rolling out to most people, and looks just as it did when we posted about this last month. To recap: common keywords and phrases are shown in the Play Store listings of apps and games, allowing you to see what people most commonly had to say about that app. It's actually pretty handy, and definitely a worthwhile addition to the Play Store.

And "...if this problem is taken care I will give you 5 stars, 1 star for now though", "... can't uninstall, 1 star" - comments like these don't serve the purpose though. So, it would be interesting to know how Google will be sorting out the comments for the preview.

blindexecutioner

I only do that when a developer changes an app significantly and doesn't communicate that with their customers in a paid app. Not everyone has titanium backup to be able to use older versions.

thespacecowboyx

Person on the Spotify app yesterday. something along the lines of

"...can't search by specific songs, giving it 3 stars. Fix it and I'll give it 5"

Well first, I hate the star rating activists...

But they are using the free version, not the paid version.

How will Google account for stupidity? Maybe it should allow people to reply to comments.

OkieDokie

If people were allowed to reply to comments it would be a shitshow flamefest and would make the review section full of useless banter. Another annoyance is when people think 1 star is the best rating... "Best app ever!!!!!", 1 star.

Total Faith

You could enable a qualification system qualifies people to comment on other recensions. That is just an idea. But it should work quite good ;)

aRvInD

Good idea. I think it can be done by Google asking to review only when User installed and uses app for more than 30 days. Those who review immediately after installing shouldn't be equated to deep reviewers...

Total Faith

Yes! That could indeed work. But how do we get this concept to Google?

People are conditioned by many app devs to act this way. Many games pressure or bribe you into rating them and giving them 5 stars after just a few minutes of use, with the promise of some in-game reward if you do so. I'm under the impression that 5 star reviews are one of the most important factors in an app's profitability.

But what's wrong with this anyway? What's wrong with saying an app is almost perfect except for these specific flaws? Seems like great feedback to me.

Kiwini

Those developers are stupid. You get the freebie for clicking the reward link... Not giving 5 stars so you can say this developer forced me to give a review so here's your 1 star, happy?

Reviews in the play store are ridiculous. Once upon a time you could see play store reviews by stars. I.E click on 2 stars and all the two star reviews would show up, or 4 stars etc etc. Nearly every single shopping site has the ability to sort reviews this way and I for one wish Google brought this function back. One and five star reviews are neither here nor there, but 2,3,and four star reviews give you a good insight. With an app like Gmail, good luck scrolling through the reviews to find the 2,3,and 4 star ones!

Total Faith

Please, just do it, Google! :(

Madis Otenurm

What about seeing reviews in all languages a la Chrome Web Store? I can see 0-5 reviews on most apps (more on popular apps of course) because people are too lazy to review things here in the first place.
For the web, there is luckily &hl=en :)

I hope those fucking shit flashlight apps get those shining 1 star warnings not to install those ad ridden disasters.

Asking money for Hello World equivalent of an app is shit and those "developers" can go fuck themselves. And still google won't pull that crap off the stores but instead promote them to top developers.

davidofmidnight

I've never liked the "Sort by Helpfulness" default - a lot of times those helpful comments are too vague to be of actual use.

When I'm looking at apps, I switch to "Sort by Newest" so I can get a sense of the current state of the app and see if the developers are actually working on things. If the newest comments are mostly positive, then I'm more likely to give the app a chance.

Marcelove

"When I'm looking at apps, I switch to "Sort by Newest"

This... That's the only setting that truly can provide some sort of helpfulness...

Bruce Wayne

I never use helpfulness. It's useless to me and rubbish. I only use newest and "latest version". Sometimes even going deeper by filtering only my device.

Kiwini

You can also look at the app description and see when's the last time it was updated... Many haven't been updated in over a year